If tobacco companies such as R.J. Reynolds, Philip
Morris, and Brown & Williamson can be held responsible for the
smoking-related deaths of millions of people, why can't the likes of
McDonald's, Burger King, Tyson, and Perdue be held similarly liable for
people's strokes and heart attacks
related to meat consumption?

The wealth of transnational corporations enables them to
employ shady scientists, scurrilous spin doctors, amoral attorneys and
advertisers, and loathsome lobbyists. If you grease enough palms, the
finger of accountability rarely points to you.

Take, for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a
rare and fatal neurological illness that does not normally occur until
middle age. But 94 people of various ages in Europe have died from a new
variant of the disease (nvCJD) which has been linked to the consumption
of cattle with mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE).
Such cattle become infected after eating feed containing the remains of
other infected cows.

The first case of BSE was reported in England in 1984,
and nearly 200,000 cattle have suffered and died. It was not until 1995
that British agribusiness stopped exporting possibly contaminated feed
to more than 80 countries. Consequently, millions of people throughout
the world may have eaten
infected beef. The long-term implications of this medical crisis have
yet to be fully understood, and the American Red Cross has taken the
"precautionary measure" of not accepting blood donated by anyone who
spent six months in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996.

By thumbing their noses at nature, farmers and feed
manufacturers placed profits before people. Now agribusiness finds
itself suffering from "foot-in-mouth disease" as foot-and-mouth disease
spreads from Britain to elsewhere in Europe and possibly the rest of the
world.

Such calamity is certainly not the fault of the animal
rights movement, which for many years has warned that meat and dairy
products harm human health. Is my naivete on public display when I
simply believe the mission of animal advocates is to educate people
about animal exploitation and the many benefits of a vegan, cruelty-free
lifestyle? And why are animal rights supporters continually accused of
"endangering" society when the public is literally being poisoned by
subsidized industries?

Take, for example, the recent efforts in the United
States to criminalize some animal rights activities. The state
legislatures in Iowa, Oregon, and Utah are currently considering bills
that toughen penalties for "commercial terrorism" by animal rights
activists. Astonishingly, when the Utah legislature was considering a
bill in the House of Representatives to protect farmers and ranchers
from acts of terrorism, the Senate rejected a bill to stiffen penalties
for acts of racist violence.

On the one hand corporations receive government
subsidies to commercially breed, mutilate, and kill animals to produce
food that kills people, but on the other hand animal activists are
interrogated, investigated, called before grand juries, and labeled as
terrorist for trying to expose and/or alleviate animal suffering and
related issues of food and environmental contamination.

The Animal Rights Network Inc., which publishes The
Animals' Agenda supports only nonviolent actions for animals. We
acknowledge that there exists in our movement a faction of people who
are so outraged and frustrated by the prevalence of animal suffering
that they sometimes act outside of the law (and sometimes in
contradiction to the values of compassion, responsibility, and
nonviolence to all beings). And although we believe there is no excuse
for harming, or threatening to harm, any human or
animal life, that same principle -- and the social moral, and legal
support of such ethics -- should make meat and dairy producers
accountable for the damage they do. BSE has already killed more people
and placed millions more at risk than the combined actions of all animal
advocated since time began.

I could go on about holding corporate interests,
government officials, and elected representatives accountable for
actions that place humans at risk and result in injury and death. But
the reality is that we're all responsible for the world we live in, even
when we boycott products of animal exploitation. It's just that (to
paraphrase George Orwell) everyone is guilty, but some people are more
guilty than others.

You have only got to see Michael Mann's film, The
Insider, which dramatically portrays how far Brown & Williamson went to
stop 60 Minutes from broadcasting an interview with a scientist fired
for blowing the whistle on Big Tobacco, to understand the power that
industry has to protect its interests. It doesn't matter whether the
"product" is inhaled or consumed; without government oversight and
accountability, greedy industries are free to blow the smoke we all
choke on.

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